It was a time of riding the
highpoint of a wave-- feeling invincible, unstoppable, like everything has been
sorted out by colors and water temperature and just waiting for its turn to
start. Much like an amusement ride, everything at some point must break
down and undergo maintenance before casualties arise or the whole thing
collapses and becomes nonviable. When exactly should one jump ship?
If you are the captain, you are held by maritime law to stay aboard till every
last soul is off in times of emergency. This is accountability. Not
many other instances in life share such strict policy. It may be
continual sleep deprivation, being overloaded with stress, perhaps even just
giving out all hope, but I can't help but wonder when the point was that I jumped
off and onto someone else's boat.
In recent time, I have come to
notice that certain everyday habits have become pointless, like so many
forgotten rituals. It was when I realized that I hadn't been spending
time with myself that I noticed exactly that what I was spending time with was a
completely empty endeavor. Social media has been praised for bringing the
world together, connecting long lost friends, family, and just as a great way
to stay "in touch". I recall Al Pacino's sonnet from The
Devil's Advocate,
"Look, but don’t touch. Touch,
but don’t taste. Taste, don’t swallow."
This is exactly what I feel about
social media in terms of "staying in touch". Maybe I’m wanting
more than "in touch". Maybe I prefer embrace over this mediocre
styling of friendship--acquaintanceship. There most definitely must be a
correlation between suicides, facebook and bullying, but one has to ask if
there's more to it than a simple equation of facebook+bullying= suicide. Where
are the variables, and why aren't people looking at the facts that aren't written on
"the wall"?
I come from a generation of people who were on the
tail end of the wired age-- a lot of people my age were the remote control for
the TV when the channel needed changed. Leaving the house randomly and
playing unsupervised outside at an undisclosed location was a normal thing for
kids. If you called someone, they may not have answered... because
they weren't home. It's always been a curiosity for me to think about a
post apocalyptic world where humans are just shadows burned into walls and
aliens scavenge through our dumps to recreate our everyday lives. Would
they have museums that feature the echoes of society through the chips and
salvaged tapes of answering machines? It was not uncommon to come home to
a blinking light on that soft white box, excited to hear the voice of the
person who reached out to talk to you, missed you, and wanted you to know that
they had tried. Their voice having intonation, pitch, sincerity while it
is delivering a message meant only for you. It was like receiving flowers
or being eight years old and answering the door to an unexpected care package
from your mother. These things are all unexpected and usually wanted.
What happens when life becomes more immediate? When there is no longer a
need for answering machines or home telephones? When you are a walking
communications hub that can track that package from anywhere in the 3G LTE
network across 48 states and most US tributaries? Does life evolve to
compensate for everything happening so fast? If it's been so slow for so
long, how do we handle everything becoming so different so suddenly?
Popularity surged facebook through
the roof, bringing it up from a strictly college student user base to the
masses--seniors, high schoolers and even children. I've spent a lot of
time on there. In fact, a good 8 or so years of my life is chronicled
through photo albums and what must seem like miles of status updates, notes and
random link postings. I was the first in my family to have a facebook,
and now both of my sisters have one, my sister's daughter has one, my dad has
one (for coupons), and even my dad's cat has a facebook. The internet
opens doors for trollers and non trollers alike, with facebook being the
ultimate in troll interfacing technology. Everyone has probably had at
least one run in with a jerk that just won't let it go or starts sewing some ludicrous
sweater of drama over a particular thread. Everyone is watching, neither
party can back down until the floor drips with the blood of the victor's
enemy. We are "friends" with these people. At what point
did the concept of "friend" take on the same properties as that
weird, watered down, orange drink McDonalds used to sell for grade school
functions? Where is the value in the term if we ourselves don't assign
it any?
Of our 700 friends on facebook, it's
easiest to send out birthday invitations to the 60 or so people we would
actually like to see on our special day, maybe expecting about 30 or so at the
most to actually show up. The day arrives, and only 5 people you invited
show up. You peruse your "feed" while drinking a beer, looking
at the pictures being posted of all the people you wanted to see that night out
and about, when they rsvp'd yes, all the while trying to figure out how in the
world you're going to finish all 120 of these damned jello shots. It's
hard to be happy when you feel like you've been forgotten by all these people
that were once a major part of your life in favor of doing what they do every
weekend, then blatantly posting and bragging about it where you can see
it. Thank goodness everyone's eaten all those tiny hotdogs! Old
Mrs. Dinsmore doesn't need any more of those!
Using social media to be a bully
isn't the whole problem here. Using it to define yourself and/or your
popularity is. We are all hooked to this giant internet teet. So
focused on updates and pictures, memes, videos-- when exactly are we spending
time with our "friends", or with ourselves for that matter? How
is this enriching our actual lives? We're all hiding behind words, and
the words can be so loaded that we all throw ourselves into a rock tumbler to
smooth out our internet presence to that of acceptable to a mass
audience. There's a false celebration of individuality, but it's
facebook... no one is going to be 100% themselves for fear of criticism.
Welcome to social media-- the big high school on a fiberoptic level where
everyone is looking to express their likes, and their dislikes even more.
It's one giant homogenized colony of superficial images of beings that are
actually much more complicated than they present themselves, but everyone seems
to overlook that part. People aren't so cut and dry, and I am not just
the person I was on facebook. I am much more than that, but because of
the evolution of facebook, I don't appear that way any longer. On facebook, I
am the cat lady. I am the weird girl that says silly stuff. I am
not the person that struggles, because no one wants to read about it. I
am not the person that donates to help other people's causes, because people
would wonder what my motive was. I am not the person that expresses all
of my thoughts, because that would scare some people, and possibly enrage
them. I am not the person I am on facebook. I suspect most people
would say the same of themselves. I have had enough of it. I shut
it down. Along with the immediacy of social interaction it provides, it
also brings the immediacy of social anxiety.
It has been 2 days since it has been
shut down. I have not felt the urge to pick it back up again. I've
decided to take the time that I would be wasting perusing pictures of animals
and food, and investing it into myself in other, more productive and self
improving ways. I am pro-choice, and I’m choosing Life over the illusion
of a life. I may return some day, but for now I am on a voyage of an
undetermined length and destination, to be left uncharted in the annals of
facebook history. To be represented by actions and not carefully selected
pros. C’est la vie, motherfuckers.
